ABSTRACT
Post-truth and popular feminism each have a foil they are positioning themselves against: misinformation and misogyny. A normalised misogyny is often the price women pay for being visible online, with digital platforms such as Twitter and Facebook doing little to monitor misogynistic misinformation campaigns. The ease with which bots, actual individuals, and websites could circulate misinformation about women and feminists within Gamergate reveals the entwined relationship between misogyny and misinformation. A dimension of the relationship between misinformation and misogyny distorts the focus of misogynistic misinformation, shifting to men claiming that women’s accusations of misogyny (manifest as sexual violence) are fabricated: an elaborate ruse to cast men as villains and criminals. The misinformation campaigns that directly challenge a dominant understanding of the ‘truth’ – such as politics, elections, et cetera – garner more public attention than misogyny, perhaps because misogyny is so deeply sedimented in structure, so normalised, that it becomes almost invisible as misinformation.
